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served as the team physician.
    If there was one institution in which blacks took the most pride, it was their schools. Their equipment and teaching materials were largely secondhand and tattered, textbooks arrived from the state missing covers and held together with tape and rubber bands, yet administrators could still boast of the many graduates—the kids of poor, uneducated migrants—who’dbecome doctors, lawyers, and teachers. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for black students to attend the better white schools, but it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and the threat of losing federal funding—that Palm Beach County began to comply. Integration was mainly voluntary, and in Belle Glade only a handful of parents dared take advantage. Johnnie Ruth Williams was one, and her decision was pivotal in the way Belle Glade would handle the sea change barreling its way.
    A cafeteria cook at Lake Shore High and the daughter of Georgia migrants, Johnnie Ruth wanted more enlightenment for her children. In 1968, when her three oldest reached junior high, she sat them down and took a vote. “Who wants to go to the white school?” she asked. Only Anthony, the youngest of the group, kept his hand down. Anthony, whom everyone called “Pearl,” wanted to go nowhere else but Lake Shore. His father, Herman, a World War II vet who worked as a school custodian, would often bring him onto the practice field to watch Poochie, Gatemouth, and the Mummy. The scene was always one of violence and shouting, with players running headlong into bare metal sleds, and coaches clearing the field for two-on-one gladiator drills that drew fists and blood.
    “I was so intimidated, but I got the big picture,” he said. “If you could fight your friend in the trenches, no telling what you could do in a game.”
    Anthony wanted to be a Bobcat, but he’d lost the vote. That fall, he and his brother and sister walked across the Fifth Street bridge, out of the familiar arms of Belle Glade’s black quarter, and into a cruel, unwelcoming world. At the time, Williams remembered only half a dozen black students attended Belle Glade Junior High, and their numbers provided no safety. Harassment was constant. Students stole Anthony’s textbooks and returned them with the word “NIGGER” scrawled through the pages. They painted it across his locker and reminded him at lunch, adding, “We just don’t want you here.”
    The harassment was more pointed in the afternoons once they crossed back over the bridge. Black kids lashed them with “Uncle Tom” and “honky lover” and shouted, “What, our school aint good enough for ya?” Back atjunior high, white teachers were slow to defend them, only asking politely, “Weren’t yall happy in your own place?” And when her kids would come home wounded and crying, Johnnie Ruth would always preach the high road, reminding them, “There’s meanness in every race.”
    Around this time, Johnnie Ruth discovered she had cancer.
    She’d been feeling sick for months and was growing concerned about a knot that had hardened under her arm near her breast. But with Herman’s pay as a custodian, and hers as a cook, there was no affording a doctor. Finally, one morning while she was taking a shower, the tumor burst. Anthony and his siblings stood frozen with fear as Herman helped Johnnie Ruth to the car, a bloody towel under her arm, then sped off to the hospital. Doctors immediately removed her breast and started her on crippling rounds of radiation.
    The treatment ravaged Johnnie Ruth’s body. She lost weight and became weak, and her skin developed large black spots. At night the children would hear her retching in the bathroom. Yet she was up every morning to make breakfast and send the kids to school, never lacking the energy to fetch a switch if homework wasn’t finished.
    Not wanting to add more stress, the children started keeping quiet about the problems at school. In fact, Anthony